Trump's clemency for Roger Stone is an admission of the president's guilt in Russia probe
Joyce White Vance, Opinion contributor
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USA TODAY Opinion•July 14, 2020
Predictably, President Donald Trump’s long-hinted pardon of his old friend, Roger Stone, came about 8 p.m. Friday. While the Trump administration is not the first to bury bad news in that part of the cycle, it has done so with great regularity. When it came, it wasn’t actually a pardon, it was a commutation. That means Stone will spend no time in jail, but his conviction still stands and he can continue his crusade to have it reversed on appeal without the admission of guilt that is implicit in a pardon. In other words, it’s a win for Stone and for Trump as well, but a terrible loss for the rule of law and American justice.
Trump, never one to let an open sore scab over, issued an official statement later Friday night, justifying the commutation as the closing act of what he still, despite evidence, deems the “Russia Hoax” — in other words, Russia’s well-documented efforts to interfere in our 2016 election on Trump’s behalf.
Having been resoundingly reminded by the Supreme Court just a day earlier that he was not above the law, it was as though he could not resist the compulsion to push back and show that he was, or at least that he could still act like he was.
Trump rewarded the man who lied to protect him from criminal investigation and congressional oversight, a shameless abuse of the presidential pardon power. Permitting Stone to avoid prison for seven felony convictions involving Trump’s campaign was the ultimate act of lawlessness.
With rare exceptions — Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, and Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa. — no one in the president’s party rose to criticize him for an outrageous breach of the rule of law. Even Attorney General William Barr and his defenders mustered nothing more than a toothless leak from the Justice Department that he had advised the president against clemency.
A presidential announcement of commutationTrump’s Friday night statement was so out of bounds that even the perpetually taciturn Robert Mueller broke his silence, reiterating that his office’s work speaks for itself, because Mueller, at least, still believes we live in a functioning democracy. The former special counsel clarified that his investigation had established Trump's “campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
This carefully chosen language says out loud what Trump has worked so hard to deny.
Trump’s statement is a transparent effort to convince his supporters that his access to power should not be constrained by his oath to uphold the Constitution. It is painful but necessary to review the lies and self-serving rationales he offers to justify his perversion of justice and disguise the quid pro quo that is Stone’s reward for concealing the truth. Too often, Trump’s misdeeds run into each other with such speed, we are on to the next one before we can fully reflect on its significance. But the Stone commutation is uniquely awful because it is a direct attempt by the president to protect himself. It is a shocking betrayal of American ideals, and we cannot let it get lost in the undertow of whatever distraction comes next.
It no longer seems strange to hear the president criticizing the work of the Justice Department he oversees, as it would have in any other presidency. If anything, it has become too familiar and seemingly normalized. Here, again, that’s Trump’s message. Indeed, in the final sentences of his statement, when Trump claims Stone has been “ treated very unfairly” and is now a “free man,” Trump sounds more like a defense lawyer who has won a hard-fought acquittal for his client than the head of the executive branch responsible for the prosecution:
Roger Stone has already suffered greatly. He was treated very unfairly, as were many others in this case. Roger Stone is now a free man!
The statement’s opening is equally deceptive. Despite his obligation to protect the country from all enemies foreign and domestic, Trump trots out the tired lie of the “Russia Hoax” to dismiss Russian interference in our 2016 election and justify commuting Stone’s sentence. Fortunately, the FBI opened a counterintelligence investigation into it, and rightly so if our elections are to have the chance to remain fair and free:
Roger Stone is a victim of the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump Presidency. There was never any collusion between the Trump Campaign, or the Trump Administration, with Russia. Such collusion was never anything other than a fantasy of partisans unable to accept the result of the 2016 election.
Stone and the Russia investigationOnce credible allegations of foreign interference in a U.S. election came to light, it would have been unthinkable for the FBI not to investigate. And far from collusion being a fantasy, Stone emerged as a central figure in the Russia investigation. Mueller, who was consistently conservative in his estimation of what the evidence could prove, nonetheless was confident in saying that Stone “communicated in 2016 with individuals known to us to be Russian intelligence officers, and he claimed advance knowledge of WikiLeaks’ release of emails stolen by those Russian intelligence officers.”
Stone was the middle man between Trump and the Russian efforts on Trump’s behalf, and if Mueller came up short on proof beyond a reasonable doubt of a criminal conspiracy, that was likely attributable, at least in part, to Stone’s evasions.
The same lies that Trump rewarded Stone for by saving him from prison also ensured that the American people never learned the full truth about Russia’s attack on the election and any role Trump’s campaign may have played. But someone thought the truth was damaging — Stone ran the risk of lying under oath to Congress and threatening a witness to avoid revealing it.
Trump moves on from complaining about hoaxes to denigrating what he labels “process-based charges.” Trump seized upon the characterization of serious offenses, like perjury and obstruction of justice, early on and has used it consistently as a rhetorical point, as though it minimizes the severity of these serious crimes:
As it became clear that these witch hunts would never bear fruit, the Special Counsel’s Office resorted to process-based charges leveled at high-profile people in an attempt to manufacture the false impression of criminality lurking below the surface.
Roger Stone outside a courthouse in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 2019.Perjury and obstruction are used to hold people who lie during an investigation accountable. Without them, successful liars would never face justice, which underlines how important they are. Trump, as always, is willing to undermine the justice system’s integrity to serve himself.
Trump actually confirms this later in his statement, furthering our understanding of why process crimes are so important:
Because no such evidence exists, however, they could not charge him for any collusion-related crime. Instead, they charged him for his conduct during their investigation.The simple fact is that if the Special Counsel had not been pursuing an absolutely baseless investigation, Mr. Stone would not be facing time in prison.
Of course, he’s wrong when he says “no such evidence exists” — abundant evidence existed but was deemed to fall short of the high standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, likely due to obstruction by Stone and others. Prosecutors’ only option was to charge Stone for his conduct during the investigation to ensure he didn’t get away with the lies. And we are fortunate that they did. Otherwise, we would know even less about the truth. The rule of law doesn’t work if people can get away with their crimes by lying about them.
The prosecution processAccording to White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, “Mr. Stone was charged by the same prosecutors from the Mueller Investigation tasked with finding evidence of collusion with Russia.”
But it is entirely unsurprising that the prosecutors who investigated Russian election interference also prosecuted efforts to obstruct that investigation. Who better? But Trump complains of their participation, before concluding:
These charges were the product of recklessness borne of frustration and malice.This is why the out-of-control Mueller prosecutors, desperate for splashy headlines to compensate for a failed investigation, set their sights on Mr. Stone.
If Mueller’s team had any hunger for splashy headlines, they could have easily provoked them. Instead, they remained professional in the face of attacks and abuse and developed evidence that Stone lied about transmitting highly accurate information about WikiLeaks and Russia’s efforts to help the Trump campaign. Prosecutors may get frustrated in the face of witnesses who withhold the truth, but malice has nothing to do with their prosecutions, and the unanimous verdict of the jury that convicted Stone on seven charges substantiates that.
Far from a failed investigation, Mueller revealed hostile action by Russia against the United States in two blockbuster indictments and convicted numerous members of the president’s inner circle.
Trump’s next effort to justify commuting Stone’s sentence is a rehash of complaints about Stone's arrest and jury that were fully litigated during his trial and rejected by the court. But even if they were accurate, these are the sort of claims a court can adequately address. They might lead to exclusion of evidence or, as Stone continues to advocate for in his appeal, a new trial. They don’t support commuting a sentence following conviction.
An unhealthy justification for Stone Trump offers another thin justification for keeping Stone out of prison: medical risk. Stone’s trial judge previously considered and rejected the evidence Stone offered in this regard:
Mr. Stone would be put at serious medical risk in prison. He has appealed his conviction and is seeking a new trial. He maintains his innocence and has stated that he expects to be fully exonerated by the justice system.
But this raises larger questions. If the president is serious and sincere in offering this as a reason to commute Stone’s sentence, there are many inmates in the Bureau of Prisons who present compelling cases for early release in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic that has hit federal prisons hard. Will the president be commuting all their sentences or just Stone’s? Absent broad release orders this week, this argument is a pretense for corruption.
Trump concludes that “Mr. Stone, like every American, deserves a fair trial. ...The President does not wish to interfere with his efforts to do so. ... However, and particularly in light of the egregious facts and circumstances surrounding his unfair prosecution, arrest, and trial, the President has determined to commute his sentence."
Here again, the president denigrates a trial, doubling down on the doubts he has cast in the minds of his followers about Stone’s trial and further damaging the country’s already fragile trust in its democratic institutions. The reality is, Stone got a fair trial. Even AG Barr acknowledged that the prosecution was "righteous" and that the sentence was warranted.
As if the commutation of Stone’s sentence alone wasn’t enough, Trump’s statement is abject testimony to his willingness to undermine the rule of law and our justice system to save himself.
Prosecutors across the country are heartsick over this miscarriage of justice. I hope they will stay at their posts because the shame is not theirs. The power to end these abuses lies within the Republican Party and Trump's appointees, like Barr. We have seen little condemnation and no resignations from them. History won't judge them kindly.
Mueller may have been prevented from securing sufficient evidence to prove there was a conspiracy between Trump’s campaign and Russia to interfere in the 2016 election, but there is more than enough evidence for an intelligent court of public opinion to reach that conclusion. Trump provided the linchpin himself, commuting the sentence of the man who lied to protect him. Why would Stone lie to Congress unless there was something important to lie about? And even Trump wouldn’t run the political risk of rewarding a witness who lied on his behalf, with an election on the horizon — unless the damage Stone could do to Trump, if he decided to cooperate to spare himself from prison, was substantial.
Roger Stone knows too much for Donald Trump to permit him to spend a single night in prison. Stone has always known that. The final piece of evidence Mueller didn’t have, but that the American people now possess — Trump provided it himself when he commuted Stone’s sentence.
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